Posted on 03/15/2006 8:18:01 AM PST by West Coast Conservative
IT is one of the most chilling images to emerge from the horror that has become, simply, 9/11. Against the steel-and-glass background of the World Trade Center, a man falls headlong 1,300ft to the street below.
While pictures of the Twin Towers billowing smoke and flames will remain the most enduring image of the terrorist attacks, this one man's dying moments somehow humanise the toll of New York's darkest day.
And yet, as famous as the image is, the man's identity has remained a mystery. Until now.
Five years after the horror of September 11, 2001, the falling man has finally been identified as Jonathan Briley, a 43-year-old who worked in a restaurant at the top of the north tower.
Over the years, his family has always assumed he perished in the building. Now, learning he had jumped is almost too much to bear.
His father, Alexander, a Baptist minister, has still not come to terms with the manner of his son's dying. "I can't talk about it," he says. "My life's work is telling people that they have to go on after tragedy, but I can't do it for myself."
Jonathan's elder sister, Gwendolyn, says: "When I first looked at the picture... and I saw it was a man - tall, slim - I said, 'If I didn't know any better, that could be Jonathan'.
"I never thought of the Falling Man as Jonathan. I thought of him as a man that just took his life in his hands for just one second.
"Did that person have so much faith that he knew that God would catch him - or was he so afraid to experience the end?"
On the day he died, Jonathan had kissed his wife Hillary goodbye before making the 20-mile journey from his home in Mount Vernon to Manhattan where he worked in the Windows On The World restaurant as a sound engineer.
That morning, the restaurant was holding a breakfast for 16 members of the Waters Financial Technology Congress, and 71 other guests.
At 8.45am, less than an hour after Jonathan arrived for work, American Airlines Flight 11 slammed into the north tower.
The impact sliced through floors 93 to 99, killing hundreds, immediately creating a 1,000C inferno as the plane's fuel ignited.
The fireball was so intense that people in the building's lobby were burned as the flames shot down the lift shafts.
But it was the 1,000 people trapped on floors 100 to 107 who were unluckiest. With the lift shafts severed and staircases blocked by rubble, fire and choking smoke, there was no escape.
With the air becoming unbreath-able, desperate staff and diners began smashing windows. And it was in those final moments that Jonathan, an asthmatic, must have made his dreadful decision...
If we don't know what went through Jonathan's mind then, we do know the last desperate thoughts of others who decided they would take fate into their own hands.
Eighteen minutes after the first plane struck, the second plane hit the south tower, trapping another 600 people.
Mother-of-two Alayne Gentul, 44, a senior vice-president of the Fiduciary Trust, was among them, and in her last few moments she called her husband, Jack.
"She told me smoke was coming in the room, coming through the vents," Jack Gentul says.
"Her breath was laboured. I asked her why she didn't go down and she said it was really hot out there. She said to me 'I'm scared'. She wasn't a person who got scared, and I said, 'Honey, it'll be all right, it'll be all right, you'll get down.'
"She said she loved me and said to tell the boys she loved them. I was so shocked I said, 'Of course I will, but it's going to be all right.' When I hung up the phone I was horrified." It was the last time the couple ever spoke.
"She was found on the street in front of the building across from hers," says Jack. "Whether she jumped or fell, I don't know. I hoped that she had succumbed to the smoke, but it doesn't seem likely.
"In some ways it might just be the last element of control... something you can do. To be out of the smoke and the heat, to be out in the air, it must have felt like flying."
Official estimates of how many people leapt from the buildings vary from 50 to 200.
US writer Tom Junod says: "Between seven and eight per cent of those who died in New York City on September 11, 2001, died by jumping out of the buildings.
"If we consider only the north tower, where the vast majority of jumpers came from, the ratio is one in six." Photographer Richard Drew, 54, had trained his I lens on the north tower and begun filming the jumpers. "You could hear them," he says. "It was a big thud, like the sound of sacks of cement hitting the ground."
When he returned to the Associated Press bureau, a sequence of 12 shots stood out.
THEY caught a man, seemingly calm, plunging to his inevitable death.
The picture was published around the world, causing widespread revulsion, as if merely looking at them was to intrude upon a moment of private agony. After September 12, the picture was rarely shown again, but Tom Junod couldn't get the image out of his head and spent years trying to discover the identity of the Falling Man.
It was executive chef Michael Lomonaco who finally solved the mystery.
"Jonathan fitted the body type, the skin colour, and it left the door open for a possibility that it was really Jonathan," Lomonaco says.
Jonathan's father is still too upset to speak about his son but his sister, Gwendolyn, is ready to talk.
"Jonathan was a person who just loved life and it was contagious so that when we were around him, you couldn't help smiling and laughing." Nobody will ever know for sure if Jonathan was the Falling Man, although the evidence makes it highly likely.
In one of the pictures, his white shirt is blown away by the wind to reveal an orange T-shirt - identical to the one he wore to work.
But as Gwendolyn says: "It's not about trying to find out who he is, but what his death says to all of us." And what it says is ... never again.
It's customary to ping a FReeper when you mention them in a post.
Yes, her account is still active. She will always live on FR.
""In the week following 9-11 there was another fatal plane crash near NYC, the airliner from the Dominican Republic.""
wrong it was november 2001, not one week later
Yes, my friend.
But even so, a spit second of pain is better than several minutes of buring to death pain.
A few people temporarily survived the impact. I saw one heart wrenching story about a triage team member who came across a woman whose upper torso was protruding from a messy puddle of goo, she told him she was still alive and begged for help. He had to black tag her and move on.
"" remember the 9/11 documentary where the sound of thud after thud after thud was revealed to be the sound of bodies hitting a roof near ground level.
I have no way to describe how I felt when I realized what those sounds actually were.""
Those sounds sounded like the bodies were falling through glass.
I saw one picture of a person after they had hit the ground.
I think you are making that part up. Source please?
I prefer to watch this video when I think about terrorists:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TN_sgUd5m_4&feature=TopRated&page=3&t=d&f=b
(takes awhile to load, but it's worth it)
NEVER FORGET
If the Republicans were media savvy and fearless ( sigh.. ) they would use some of the footage from the tribute and run it as a commercial.
I would juxtapose the burning Towers and the faces of the murder victims ( used with permission ) with Russ Feingold and the Democrats demanding that President Bush be censured a/o impeached because he dared to wire tap Al Queda.
Dear God, how horrific for this family. Prayers for them.
Usually people die from the smoke inhalation before burning.
wrong it was november 2001, not one week later
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Since you seem so attentive to detail I am surprised to see that you didn't notice the quotation marks around that sentence in my post. Most of us here know that that indicates that it was lifted from the post to which the reply is being sent.
Aw give him a break, it's his third day here...
also the airliner wasnt from the DR, it was going there.
Damn their souls. I don't know whether there is a Hell but I hope there is and that they are there and suffering throughout eternity.
<< But as Gwendolyn says: "It's not about trying to find out who he is, but what his death says to all of us." And what it says is ... never again. >>
Says it all!
Before, he seemed kind of symbolic...like the Unknown Soldier.
I'm so sorry for his family.
One word added to yours, may their murderers come back in their next life as pig food.
I still ache over that photo and the day.
>I think you are making that part up. Source please?
Council of Braga(not the Star Trek guy!), circa 563. Source: The Catholic Encyclopedia, as posted at newadvent.org.
In the council of 563 eight bishops took part, and twenty-two decrees were promulgated, among others the following: [...] that nothing should be sung in the church but the Psalms and parts of the Old and New Testament; that all priests who abstained from eating meat should be obliged to eat vegetables cooked in meat, to avoid all suspicion of the taint of Priscillianism, and that if they refused they should be excommunicated; that suicides and catechumens should not be buried with great ceremony, nor should anyone be buried inside the church[...]Recall early Christians who viewed the desire to live as a sign of being too tied to this world when we could be with Our Father (I've read that their carved initials of where they jumped from north African cliffs could still be seen in the 20th Century, but I am not sure that they've survived til now, what with all the religious conflicts there...). It wasn't until the writings of Augustine of Hippo (against his opponents in the Church) and the AD 563 Council of Braga that this was turned on its head, and suicide was reversed into a sin. But then, that made some of the saints sinners...so exceptions had to be added (and to be fair to Augustine, he recognized these problems and added some of the loopholes himself, such as for St. Pelagia of Antioch).
I don't mean to turn this into a religious thread; I was just commenting in response to an implication that it took the Pope's word to make jumping from a burning building not a sin, when it hadn't originally been one in the first place.
They don't have to, they were pigs in THIS lifetime. As a matter of fact, there was PIG roast in hell on 9-11.
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